Lorde Provides Update on Album Two: ‘I Am About to Show You the New World’

It's been three years since Lorde stormed Top 40 radio with "Royals" and effectively stole the crown with her massively successful debut album, Pure Heroine.

In the time between, Lorde experienced a wealth of emotions thanks to her newfound fame. And today (Nov. 7), on the young singer's 20th birthday, she took the opportunity to look back on that moment in her final few hours as a teenager — while looking ahead at what's to come.

"I was 16 when most of us met. Can you believe it? I laugh thinking about that me now - that glossy idiot god, princess of her childhood streets, handmade and ugly and sure of herself," she wrote in a Facebook post.

"Sometime in the last year or so, part of me crossed over. For one thing, I made a very deliberate choice to withdraw for a little while from a public life. I haven’t had my hair or makeup done in a year, the free handbags dried up LONG ago, and the paparazzi at the airport are almost always for someone else. And let me tell you, as much as I love being full noise album cycle girl, it's been a motherf--king joy." (Back in July, she even tweeted about her Uber driver not recognizing her.)

So what came of stepping away from the spotlight and her dramatic rise and fall from the public eye in the past few years? Her follow-up, which is almost done: "I wrote a record about it, all of it, so much more than what I’ve written down here, and I’m in new york getting it done," she says.

"Writing Pure Heroine was my way of enshrining our teenage glory, putting it up in lights forever so that part of me never dies, and this record - well, this one is about what comes next."

Sadly, we're not close enough to nailing down a release date beyond "soon" just yet — but it does sound like she's already plotting the specifics of the whole campaign, including "the live show."

"I want nothing more than to spill my guts RIGHT NOW about the whole thing - I want you to see the album cover, pore over the lyrics (the best I’ve written in my life), touch the merch, experience the live show. I can hardly stop myself from typing out the name. I just need to keep working a while longer to make it as good as it can be. You'll have to hold on. The big day is not tomorrow, or even next month realistically, but soon. I know you understand."

As the clock struck midnight and Lorde turned 20 in the middle of drafting the note, she concluded with one optimistic final tease: "The party is about to start. I am about to show you the new world."